CodeIgniter is an open source PHP web application framework with a lot of features. Recently, thanks to the latest update, a new feature was added to this framework, called the Cart Class. In this tutorial, we're going to take advantage of this new class, and write a shopping cart system, with a touch of jQuery added in.

You'll probably want to be a bit familiar with CodeIgniter and how it works before getting started, but it wouldn't take much. Configuration file changes and code snippets for the model, view and controller of the cart are all provided. You can also download the source if you want to get started right away.

After teasing you guys for a week or so, I've released the entire video tutorial course on building a PHP based shopping cart. There is a small charge ($19.99) to download the entire course, but it is more than worth it since you get 140 minutes of top notch nerd training...and we include the source code too.

The course walks you through the creation of the cart - what technology you'll need, building the simple catalog page, making the "add to cart" page, as well as the cart itself (including calculating the costs and shipping costs). It also includes an integration method for hooking into PayPal's IPN setup to change the customer for the goods.

I just released a new PHP shopping cart video tutorial for beginners. In this series of videos, you learn how to build a PHP based shopping cart that works with Paypal.

The result is an object-oriented cart script that can interface with PayPal via XML messages. You can find other great video tutorials in the PHP videos section of the site.

Finally, a link to the shopping cart is provided, although you could just as easily have displayed the cart contents on the same page. For the sake of brevity I'll just show you how to integrate the add feature, and will leave the subtraction mechanism to you as an exercise.

The Ajax frontend calls a managecart.php backend file that calls addToCart and deleteFromCart based on which type of "task" is passed to it.

Just discovered the the excellent script.aculo.us drag and drop shopping cart. It is implemented with the script.aculo.us javascript library and ruby on rails. It is a perfect fit for a project I am working on but I needed a PHP version here is the rough first draft with source code.

I can definitely see something like this being the next step in ecommerce sites. No more hitting "Add to Cart" and waiting for the page to refresh, view the cart, then hit "Continue Shopping". Simply drag it in and it pops right up...]]> Thu, 29 Dec 2005 06:30:44 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4430 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4430 Robert Peake has a post with a fix for a rather large issue with the Zen Cart software - a SQL injection vulnerability.

One thing that really irks me is when people publish security vulnerabilities they discover without publishing the fix. Doing so only benefits the hacker (most specifically, the script kiddie) community, begging the question, "which side are you on?" Whenver I discover a vulnerability or exploit, I make it a point to first and foremost contact the vendor (or group responsible if it is not a commercial product) and then only announce the exploit after a fix is available (if then).

Not enlisting vendor support or at very least describing how a vulnerability can be patched does not help users of that software unless they are savvy enough to figure out the fix on their own. One such example is the announcement of a SQL injection vulnerability in Zen-Cart <= 1.2.6d.

He Goes through the two steps needed to fix the issue, and includes substitution code to correct the injection problem. I definitely agree with his sentiment about reporting and trying to offer a fix for the problem before just sharing it with the world. Sure, there are the people out there that can spot the problem and offer up their own patch, but there seems to (unfortunately) be more out there that would rather abuse it...]]> Mon, 05 Dec 2005 07:03:09 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4413 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4413 AjaxDeveloper.org today, there's a new pointer to a blog post from Patrick on the creation of a Simple AJAX/PHP Shopping Cart.

I recently read an article from John Wiseman on creating a MySQL connection with AJAX (article link). Being a newcomer to the AJAX world I've found many tutorials and code libraries to be rather bloated and presumptious. John's article however was right on target and really got me going in the write direction to start thinking about AJAX and how it should work.

Given that article I started tinkering around and wound up creating a simple shopping cart application for a client. Below is a scaled down version of said application that hopefully can help you along in your AJAX travels.

There's plenty of code here to get you started, including the database structure, all availible for download. He doesn't explain much of it, but he does show where the Ajax is used - adding/removing/etc products from the shopping cart...]]> Thu, 01 Dec 2005 07:58:17 -0600